Book Pick: Youth in Revolt

The eponymous main character of “Skippy Dies,” Paul Murray’s dark yet hilarious second novel, is described in this week’s review as a “pill-taking, meekly deranged fourteen-year-old, whose truncated coming-of-age serves as the central narrative of a book bursting with characters and incidents of wildly varying registers.” Murray is known as a writer with range, and in “Skippy Dies,” he blends “the ensemble high jinks of the Harry Potter novels with Muriel Spark’s grinning morbidity.” The result is a book that delves into some very harrowing territory, but Murray engages his reader throughout “owing to the strength of his remarkable dialogue, which captures the free-associative, sex-obsessed energy of teen-age conversation in all its coarse, riffing brilliance.”

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